Recent reports suggest that the White House has at last acted to allow the shipments of weapons that had been withheld from Israel and to end further the delays. On this topic, Elliott Abrams comments, “I don’t know what and how much has been held up, but it shouldn’t have happened. The level of delay should be zero.”

In this interview with Ariel Kahana, Abrams also comments on the failings of U.S. policy toward Iran, and the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce existing sanctions:

According to Abrams, Iran has indeed halted the advancement of its nuclear program on rare occasions. “This happened when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, and when [President] Trump eliminated Qassem Suleimani in 2020. The U.S. needs to be ready to use force in Iran, but credibility is critical here. Only if [Iran’s leaders] are convinced that the U.S. is willing to act will they stop.”

Abrams claims that the U.S. president tried for two-and-a-half years to revive the nuclear deal with Iran until he realized it wasn’t interested. “Iran has benefited from this situation, and everyone outside the administration sees it as a failure.”

On Sunday, a synagogue in Los Angeles’s heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood held an event for those interested in purchasing real estate in Israel. Noah Pollak, who was present, describes what ensued:

Over the course of several hours, with dozens of LAPD officers decked out in riot gear largely staying out of the fray, around 100 pro-Hamas activists attacked, bear-sprayed, harassed, and brawled with Jews up and down Pico Boulevard.

The police occasionally stepped in, but their main activity Sunday afternoon seemed to be to ensure that the activists were able successfully to shut down the front entrance to the synagogue, ruin the event, and harass Jews more or less with impunity. Dozens of video clips from Sunday afternoon have been posted online. . . . The striking thing about the footage is that despite the significant police presence, there is scant footage of the police forcefully intervening in the numerous fistfights, brawls, and beatings.

When Pollak tried to enter the synagogue, the police advised him to leave. He later found out from a friend that it was possible to enter through a rear exit. “How hard would it have been,” he asks, to instruct the protesters to move to “a safe distance away from the entrance to the synagogue and ensure freedom of entry and exit?”

And that brings us to the similarity to the pogroms of 19th-century Russia, a comparison I mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter. The violence of these outbursts was greater, but—contrary to popular perception—they were not organized or encouraged by the authorities, who didn’t like any kind of disorder and were constantly afraid riots would evolve into revolt. But police were generally reluctant to stop pogroms; the idea that it could be their job to protect Jews seemed to them counterintuitive. Similarly, Pollak writes that today,

as they have realized on elite college campuses and in . . . cities across the country, anti-Israel activists understand that they enjoy something like immunity. They can’t murder or severely beat people, but pretty much all other criminality—vandalism, graffiti, trespassing, harassment—will go unpunished. . . . If you think that’s unfair, just look at the statement released yesterday by the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. She pledged to take three actions in response to the Pico pogrom.

None of them involve arresting and punishing the perpetrators.